First time got hit by a scam artist

Our non profit organization sent a check to a Vet for spay and neutering from an account that was sent up within our organization that has a substantial (for our standards) amount of money that was left to us in a will for this purpose.

Check was only for $300 or so to the vet.

Treasurer got a call from police.

What we figured out...

Person went to Vets office and took the mail that was in the outside mail box at the Vet's office.

Person then took our check and had checks made up from a "check making company" and scanned our treasurers (sp?) signature on the fake checks.

Bank called us because the check sequence numbers on the check didn't make sense to the bank. Also, the check was made out for over three grand to this individual, not to a Vet like we normally make them out.

Person is in police custody and we will be pressing charges.

What I find amazing is how easy this was.

If this person wouldn't of been so stupid to make out such a large check and would of kept the check numbers "in order", they might of been able to get away with it for some time before someone caught on.

Bank told us this was nothing out of the ordinary that they come across.

Scary to a point.

We almost got somewhat the same thing. We started getting a lot of people coming in and applying for jobs. I don't know exactly how the plan went down or if each person did their own stealing but these people started stealing both our incoming and outgoing mail. They knew exactly where each was so it was a team effort. We figured this out as checks that were going out was not getting to the places they were suppose to be. We called the police and they already knew of the scam, it was going around our town. We had to cancel the checks we sent and we lost some of the checks that came in. we don't think any of customers got hit, we paid for the voided checks and they wrote us new ones.

murph